#DigiWomenKA: Jivka Ovtcharova - a woman of the world with a down-to-earth attitude
Female role models are important. They show possibilities, they help to define your own goals and we can learn from your experiences. In our blog series #DigiWomenKA, Katharina Iyen meets one such role model from Karlsruhe’s digital sector once a month to find out more about them, their experiences and their commitment. Today she talks to Jivka Ovtcharova, Engineering scientist, director at the Karlsruhe Research Center for Information Technology (FZI) and professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Jivka Ovtcharova visits me in the early afternoon in Ettlingen city. She is a very elegant woman. She wants to take her boots off in the hallway. I bend over backwards and put on extra shoes to signal to my guest that it’s okay if she keeps hers on. I quickly realize that this woman is very down-to-earth and has kept her feet firmly on the ground. A characteristic that I have noticed in all #DigiWomenKA so far. We start our conversation in the sunshine of my living room bay window with black tea and chocolates.
Jivka Ovtcharova holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering and computer science and an honorary doctorate. The KIT professor is head of the Institute for Information Management in Engineering (IMI) at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and founder of the KIT Lifecycle Engineering Solutions Center (LESC). She is also Director of the Research Center for Information Technology (FZI) in Karlsruhe. She is the winner of the Edition F Award 2014 25 Women for the Digital Future. I am impressed.
“A friend, who works in the digital sector herself, applied for the job. I really was chosen from thousands of applicants – that was completely unexpected for me,” Ovtcharova recalls. The #DigiWoman with three doctorates liked it at Edition F in Berlin: “Edition F is a modern, great format. Not just talk. Those who really have something to say have their say.” This is a good fit, as she herself holds Ted X Talks and sometimes takes part in panel discussions with politicians such as Günther Oettinger, popular philosophers such as Richard David Precht or star photographers such as Michel Comte.
However, her many titles, activities and awards can sometimes distract from a very approachable woman, a social climber who was given nothing for free. “I don’t care about titles at all, the inner values are much more important,” Ovtcharova admits to me.
Childhood and 100,000 years of technology
Jivka Ovtcharova was not born into a steep career path. She was born in Bulgaria. Both parents worked so that they had enough to live on. “My parents were very hardworking, but we weren’t wealthy. Our money went on food, clothes and culture,” she explains. Her older sister needed a lot of attention, so Jivka kept herself busy. She was interested in books, especially about technology, and she did a lot of handicrafts.
A gift from her father, which can still be found on the professor’s bookshelf today, paved the way for her future career. “He gave me the three volumes “100,000 Years of Technology”. I was fascinated by all the advances that mankind has made through technology. For me, this process of conceiving inventions and turning them into reality basically means virtuality, which is the focus of my research today: you can mentally imagine completely new products or technologies and turn them into reality through virtual engineering. For me, the virtual world is infinite and offers unimagined possibilities for each and every one of us. The virtual world really is open to everyone.”
By virtual, however, the expert does not mean the computer-generated metaverse; for her, this digital space is merely the technological parallel image of physical reality in the narrower sense. She understands virtuality primarily as people’s imagination and its anchoring in real life: “Many ideas about new things are strongly based on a subjective position. For many people, something new means something newly created, or something they have not yet experienced: a new movie, a new house or a new journey.
It is generally understood that the new is connected to change. More precisely, it is not just a question of what the new is, but what changes or developments it is subject to, what relationships it can enter into and, last but not least, what reactions it can cause. The transition from virtuality to reality – and vice versa – is fluid. Regardless of where you are in the world and under what conditions you were born, everyone has the power of imagination and fantasy. With these skills and the right technologies at their disposal, they can create new values that are comprehensible.” Ovtcharova explains to me that our data is the only resource that is growing and not shrinking. The expansion of physical reality into the virtual will accelerate. The product of virtuality is infinite, like its nature. “Data is and will remain our only infinite resource.”
Blows of fate, lessons learned and adaptation
Deeply impressed by her words, I wonder if looking into her past will help me understand what experiences have shaped these thoughts and this person. As if my question is written all over my face, Ovtcharova begins to talk. The Chernobyl disaster at the end of April 1986 changed her life from one minute to the next. At the time, she was working as a nuclear engineer at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in the capital Sofia: “I remember May 2, 1986 as a day full of sunshine and invisible danger at the same time. We were in a green field and had to measure the radioactivity. Everything seemed fine – but the Geiger counters were going crazy. The radiation was insanely high. I learned then that you can’t really control anything and that good things can suddenly turn bad.”
The professor reflects and continues: “Just like today in the discussion about so-called artificial intelligence. If I’ve learned anything, it’s to ‘shed my skin’. A good friend once said that about me. I can confirm that: I have extreme adaptability. It’s definitely one of my most important qualities that has always helped me in difficult situations. You always keep going. You are responsible for yourself in every situation.” At the age of 30, she was living on 800 Deutschmarks a month in 17 square meters. In October 1987, she came to Germany to do research in Darmstadt on a doctoral scholarship. “I worked at the Technical University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research until 1996. I had nothing except a head, two hands and three suitcases,” she says with a laugh.
Existing on a small scale didn’t bother her: “I felt comfortable, I had my goal in mind. My first investments were a television and a sewing machine. The TV to improve my German and the sewing machine to sew fashionable clothes for myself using Burda patterns.” The family placed great importance on a well-groomed appearance and a good wardrobe: “In Eastern Europe, people are very aware of how to appear in public. My parents taught me to pay close attention to this.” Her clothes stood out: “I’ve always cared about fashion. Being professional and elegant at the same time is one of my ideals.”
After the Chernobyl disaster, it quickly became clear to her that her engineering degree in nuclear energy no longer offered her any prospects for the future: “After a few hours, I was already mentally moving towards computer simulations,” she tells me with a laugh. Shortly after arriving in Germany, she devoted herself to computer-aided design (CAD) and virtual reality (VR). In the mid-90s, Jivka Ovtcharova switched to the automotive industry. With two doctorates under her belt, the Bulgarian-born designer did not want to be seen as a mere academic, but as a thoroughbred engineer. From 1998 to 2003, she headed the Process and System Integration Center at General Motors in the International Technical Development Center of Adam Opel GmbH in Rüsselsheim. “Getting into the industry was difficult,” she recalls. “My Eastern European background and the fact that I was a woman made it challenging. However, thanks to my interdisciplinary education and qualifications, I occupied an important niche.”
Networking #DigiWomen is still needed in Karlsruhe today
Asserting herself as a woman in an environment that was previously characterized by a lack of female managers continues in her stations. She has been in Karlsruhe since 2003. At that time, she took up her professorship at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at KIT, the first female professor in the 150-year history of the faculty. Her memories of it are therefore not all positive: “I was a woman and a foreigner who still spoke with an accent, and not all my colleagues could cope with that back then. She still remembers well how a retired professor made a condescending comment at an event. “He said to me: I don’t understand what you’re saying. How did you become a professor in the first place?” She has learned not to take such incidents personally: “I have realized that such behaviour ultimately says nothing about me, but a lot about the other person.”
She was therefore still able to find peace with Karlsruhe. “I really feel at home here in the southwest. It’s a bit like Bulgaria, there are mountains and meadows and the sun shines, I need that.” She also appreciates the Karlsruhe region for its diversity when it comes to IT. “We have over 3,000 IT companies here, which is the highest concentration in Europe. I have a lot to do with the CyberForum and the Karlsruhe Technology Region (TRK). I experience a real pioneering spirit in the region.” What Ovtcharova also likes about the region’s cities is their manageability. “I lived for several years in cities with millions of inhabitants, such as Moscow and Sofia. There are always lots of people around you. At some point, you just want some peace and quiet and enough space. I only really arrived in Baden-Baden.”
However, she does not yet see women in IT and engineering as well connected locally, rather those from the digital media industry. For example, she worked as an equal opportunities officer at KIT. “I think it’s time to stop discussing gender. Digitalization has no gender. It’s time to stop this discussion about women and men or women versus men. What needs to change is diversity – through education and upbringing. Stereotypes must be abolished and everyone must be treated as a single group.
From poetry to artificial intelligence
And yet another sentence that impresses me with its foresight. I doubt and wonder whether there is actually something she can’t do. Shocked, I realize that I said the sentence out loud. Ovtcharova laughs and doesn’t have to think twice. “Politician’s German,” she jokes, adding: “I can’t talk around it. I come from the world of technology – what I say has to work.”
I find that Ovtcharova often expresses herself very poetically during our conversation. When I point this out to her, she laughs: “You got me. I used to write poetry as a child.” Her affinity for the arts is clear to see, this woman is anything but an IT nerd. Rather cosmopolitan with elements of a polymath. She does not even shy away from philosophical thoughts. She rejects the concept of artificial intelligence, for example. She finds it misleading: “There is no such thing as artificial intelligence. It’s algorithms and patterns. If there is, then it’s machine intelligence. The special thing about human intelligence is that it doesn’t work according to patterns. Humans have consciousness and search for the solution to a problem without even really knowing the problem. That is ambiguity and creativity, and the machine cannot do that. Machines are not new-creative, they don’t create anything original.”
Persevering creative spirit
Ovtcharova, whose retirement age is not so far off, clearly demonstrates that the question of how we shape our future is not a question of age. On the contrary, she is far from thinking about resting. “Biological age means nothing to me, it’s just a number. I may have the security of a civil servant today, but I always make my life a little uncomfortable because I really want to stay alert.”
It has just launched the new RegioMORE innovation project in Bühl in cooperation with the city of Bühl and the Karlsruhe technology region – with a volume of 12 million euros. In their concept of sandbox labs, companies should be able to simulate process changes as if they were playing in a sandbox – without consequences. The concept also provides access to education for many groups of people, including those from outside the field. “We need more skilled workers for companies, so we shouldn’t be afraid to train single mothers, for example, who may not have been in work for a long time. It’s about ensuring that everyone can participate in society and make a contribution. This is the only way we can truly achieve regional digital transformation. The first thing we have to do is change our attitudes.”
But that is not enough. She is currently in the conception phase of a book on the subject of virtuality. “Not written academically, rather prosaically!” explains Jivka Ovtcharova. And there it is again, the creativity in her technical work. And so she closes our conversation with a smile – and again very poetically: “As long as you are in this world, life is like a river. And when something comes along, the river changes direction and somehow flows differently – but continues. Just like virtuality. The virtual in us is constantly flowing, constantly changing, constantly evolving. It is a way of finding orientation in unclear situations. A great help, especially for life today.”
Contact Jivka Ovtcharova
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jivka-ovtcharova-51b55b9/
XING: https://www.xing.com/profile/Jivka_Ovtcharova/cv
KIT page: https://www.imi.kit.edu/24.php